Modern warfare and law enforcement strategies require highly-trained operators. The highly-trained operators undergo extensive and expensive training and typically become the most valuable asset to their respective units. Essentially, these highly-trained operators are a very expensive, highly valuable weapons systems. Many of the highly-trained operators, like those operators who are members of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), dedicate their lives to performing extremely dangerous and critical missions to protect the national security of the United States. These operators take on extraordinary risk to their personal safety and have a high risk of suffering one or more physical injuries in performing their jobs over the course of their careers.
Further, highly-trained operators are so dedicated to their careers that they ignore non-critical-failure-types of injuries because of their desire to complete a mission for their units, help a fellow operator, or meet their personal goals of fulfilling their commitment to their country. When receiving treatment for an injury, the highly-trained operators tend to push through pain and sometimes mask the pain with and without pain medication or other pain relief aids. They also tend to provide inaccurate, although genuine, subjective feedback during their medical reviews, like understating the severity of their injuries and their associated pain.
The highly-trained operators, for example the SOCOM operators, are trained in a variety of different areas, including physical training, tactical training, and psychological training. When the operators suffer a physical injury, all of their training is affected. Specifically, an injured operator may suffer a shoulder injury that requires surgery. The operator medically heals from the surgery and is returned to his unit without further assessment of his ability to meet physical training requirements of his unit or branch, perform tactical duties that are unique to the operator and/or the unit, or undergo any psychological evaluation. The operator's shoulder may appear to be medically healed, but his shoulder is not evaluated under tactical conditions, like firing his weapon(s) or performing hand-to-hand combat techniques, which leaves the operator feeling insecure about his tactical capabilities and his ability to execute missions safely and successfully and to be a productive member of his unit.
In another example, military fighter pilots, like the F-18 jet pilots, have a high incidence of neck and back injuries, some of their injuries being chronic that typically present or worsen over a long period of time. A pilot's neck injury, for example, might appear to have medically healed after a required surgery to repair an injury. However, the pilot has not yet undergone the physical demands of flying the F-18 jet, which are highly rigorous, after the surgery. Even further, oftentimes the pilots are not tested properly for the physical demands of flight before suffering the injuries to establish any kind of baseline data for the pilots' physical conditions and/or readiness to pilot their respective aircrafts.
Such pilots have unique occupational requirements of which a typical, non-pilot person suffering a similar neck injury does not because of the pilot's highly-specialized training and job duties. Specifically, piloting a fighter jet like an F-18 aircraft is known to cause chronic, degenerative neck and back injuries. The pilots are not conventionally tested under their occupational requirements to determine whether any neck or back injuries exist and that the pilots are ready to undertake the physical demands that are known to be required of such pilots. Pilots who return to an active flight status too quickly after an injury have a high risk of re-injury, further damage to the injury area, and/or may suffer development of chronic conditions or advancement of degenerative conditions.
Other highly-trained operators also have specialized occupational demands. For example, law enforcement generally has unique physical, occupational demands that might include firing or using a weapon and engaging in and resolving physical altercations. Even more specifically, highly-trained law enforcement operators, like agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), Pararescue troopers, the Department of Energy (DOE) special operations, specialized firefighters for the Forest Service, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, pilots, among others, for any of these groups undergo highly-specialized training for their jobs that includes tactical and other job-related physical and psychological training. The law enforcement highly-specialized operators have specific, physical requirements for their jobs, similar to the highly-trained military operators, to mitigate their risk of injury and to increase the likelihood that their missions are completed successfully and safely.
The military and law enforcement operators require significant training that can total $500,000 or more for SOCOM operators, for example, just to complete their initial acceptance training (sometimes referred to as the “pipeline”) into the career field. The SOCOM operators undergo continued training throughout their careers, which brings the total financial investment in their training to an even higher amount. The training of the highly-trained operators is critical to the success and safety of their occupational activities, such as dangerous military missions.
Frequently, these highly-trained operators suffer physical injuries as a result of their jobs and have a period of time of being unable to perform their jobs because of the injuries. When operators are not able to do their jobs, unit commanders or the operators' other leadership have uncertainty in selecting operators to execute key missions, the operators may feel inadequate because they cannot participate in a key mission, and the operators and unit morale decreases when the unit is missing a key member and/or operators do not recover well from an injury.
When the injured highly-trained operators report a physical injury, they typically undergo medical treatment for the injury. Some of the physical injuries suffered by the highly-trained operators require several weeks to several months or even longer for a full recovery. While the injured operators are recovering, they do not typically perform the tactical and/or other physical occupational requirements of their jobs because their medical recovery requires that they stop such activities to allow the injuries to heal. Towards the end of the injured operators' healing process, medical providers analyze the injured operators to determine whether the injury is medically healed. At the time of the medical analysis of the injuries, most of the injured operators have not performed the tactical requirements that are typical or required for their jobs, which can leave the operators feeling insecure about performing the tactical activities of their jobs and potentially physically deficient after their injuries are deemed to be medically healed.
Still further, the highly-trained operators oftentimes have such intense dedication to their units, their missions, and themselves that they do not report physical injuries, they downplay the severity of an injury, they return to full duty before an injury is fully healed, and they use medication or other pain relief tools to mask their physical pain. The injured operators are not generally monitored or tracked for an injury or during the injury recovery process. A commander is typically required to make a decision on whether to rely on an operator based on whether the operators report an injury, which they may be unlikely to do, and whether they have fully recovered from the injury based on the operators' subjective, and oftentimes down-played, inaccurate feedback, and the analysis from a medical provider who evaluates the operators on typical medical standards. In the current rehabilitation programs available to operators, their commanders do not have the data necessary to determine whether the injured operators can perform their tactical duties and successfully execute a mission without a high risk of re-injuring themselves or other operators.
When highly-trained operators suffer injuries, they tend to lose confidence in their skills required to perform their job, specifically the tactical skills required to perform their jobs. The currently available medical and rehabilitation systems do not offer the injured operators the ability to measurably improve their confidence in their tactical skills after they suffer an injury and are considered medically healed. The injured operators' confidence in their physical and tactical skills oftentimes erodes after physical injuries, and their cumulative effects, which leads to some operators having a pre-mature retirement from their units, leads to reduced morale in the units, and to overall career dissatisfaction and negative public opinion of the unit, the military, and/or the government. Further, the injured operators tend to be so eager to return to their units quickly that they are willing to mask physical pain with pain medication and ignore their medical conditions that are in need of further treatment. The current medical and physical rehabilitation systems available to injured operators do not support the long-term health and well-being of the highly-trained operators, the best asset and most valuable weapons system available to any unit.
Still further, with the currently available medical and rehabilitation systems, the highly-trained operators can be returned to unrestricted duty without a comprehensive plan of care to follow-up with the operator on the injury at any future time. Instead, the operator is expected to report any future re-injury or new injury and begin the medical treatment process again, which can be daunting. Many injured operators returning to duty continue to experience physical pain or other symptoms of their injuries in performing their tactical and other occupational duties that they have not performed since before the injury. The operators experiencing continued physical pain from their injuries may rely on pain medication to mask the physical pain of the injuries without realizing that their injuries need further medical treatment or without wanting to seek the further medical treatment. Masking physical pain with pain medication is dangerous to the operators' health and increases the risk of re-injury and failed missions.
By releasing the operators back to full duty status based on their subjective feedback and a medical evaluation alone, the operators' commanders do not have any data to assess the operator's tactical abilities and capacities, improve unit safety procedures, assess budget requirements, develop new training, determine personnel needs for mission planning and other reasons, succession planning, etc. The Commanders also struggle to hold the returning operators responsible for any continuing medical treatment that might be recommended or required to continue the operators' injury recovery process and/or to help prevent re-injury because the Commanders do not have injury benchmarks, metrics or any such data to do so.
If a commander has an injured operator that needs future or ongoing medical treatment, the current medical and rehabilitation systems do not inform the commander of the recommended medical treatment and do not lay out a plan for the commander to supervise the operator in undergoing the medical treatment. Current medical and rehabilitation systems do not engage the commander in the future medical treatment of an injured operator after the operator is returned to full duty status or provide the commander with data driven tactical capacity assessment baselines to monitor the operator after returning to full duty.
Because of the government's and law enforcement's responsibility to their highly-trained operators, such as the SOCOM operators, an injured operator's injury maintenance system is needed to evaluate and treat the injured operators with a customized treatment plan. The art could benefit from an injury maintenance system that provides to the injured operator a future plan of care and optionally provides to the operator's commander an injury report that includes both the medical and occupational evaluation and treatment. Still further, the art could benefit from an injury tracking system.